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illyanadallas222's review
5.0
A harrowing but beautiful memoir. Probably the best memoir I have ever read.
The themes of subjected dehumanisation and adaptability have been formally epitomised in Primo Levi’s 1946 memoir Surviving Auschwitz, and despite social justice efforts are a reoccurring issue still to this day. Primo Levi’s novel takes the reader on a prolific and personal journey of the life as an enslaved Jew in the Auschwitz Concentration camp in Poland, and through him and others, experience the means they took in order to survive. Levi utilises the specific rhetorical devices such foil characters, logos, ethos and pathos, as an instrument to become one with the reader, to experience as if they themselves, were subjected to the consequences of racism and long term imprisonment.
These harrowing aphorisms that were made in Auschwitz are a concurrent struggles reiterated in lethal environments many are still a victim of today.
The themes of subjected dehumanisation and adaptability have been formally epitomised in Primo Levi’s 1946 memoir Surviving Auschwitz, and despite social justice efforts are a reoccurring issue still to this day. Primo Levi’s novel takes the reader on a prolific and personal journey of the life as an enslaved Jew in the Auschwitz Concentration camp in Poland, and through him and others, experience the means they took in order to survive. Levi utilises the specific rhetorical devices such foil characters, logos, ethos and pathos, as an instrument to become one with the reader, to experience as if they themselves, were subjected to the consequences of racism and long term imprisonment.
These harrowing aphorisms that were made in Auschwitz are a concurrent struggles reiterated in lethal environments many are still a victim of today.
gadicohen93's review
4.0
Wstawać.
Why did the last page of Truce shatter me? Years after Levi died, many decades after he survived Auschwitz, I read it and still felt the enormous haunt of what the Nazis did. After what seemed like an entire book that rejected the idea that the Holocaust represented something inherently wicked in human nature -- hundreds of pages celebrating the triumph over Auschwitz, the escape, community and chutzpah and character over the gray decimation of persons -- Levi writes in the last pages of a "truce". A truce -- it is unclear really what it is a truce of -- seemingly between the survivors of the Holocaust and the perpetrators of it, or perhaps the memory of their actions. Quite the reversal.
Everything we do as humans is tarnished by the Nazis; we live in a dream that is corrupt in its core, that is drained from its color when you look at it close enough. Esther Perel says that the "erotic is the antidote to death", and perhaps Levi says here that eroticism has been ruined, wasted, invalidated. That there is no redemption.
Why did the last page of Truce shatter me? Years after Levi died, many decades after he survived Auschwitz, I read it and still felt the enormous haunt of what the Nazis did. After what seemed like an entire book that rejected the idea that the Holocaust represented something inherently wicked in human nature -- hundreds of pages celebrating the triumph over Auschwitz, the escape, community and chutzpah and character over the gray decimation of persons -- Levi writes in the last pages of a "truce". A truce -- it is unclear really what it is a truce of -- seemingly between the survivors of the Holocaust and the perpetrators of it, or perhaps the memory of their actions. Quite the reversal.
Everything we do as humans is tarnished by the Nazis; we live in a dream that is corrupt in its core, that is drained from its color when you look at it close enough. Esther Perel says that the "erotic is the antidote to death", and perhaps Levi says here that eroticism has been ruined, wasted, invalidated. That there is no redemption.